


Thanks For The Memories

by babagaia



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, F/F, Memory Alteration, Smuggling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-15 04:48:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17522240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babagaia/pseuds/babagaia
Summary: In a cyberpunk AU, Lisa and Amy smuggle memories. Lisa deals with the consequences of getting high off her own supply. Powers are replicated through tech.Thank you to keira, Grizzityuck, Anaccountforfurrythings, misha906, The Sleeping Knight, Discreet, and Fcrants for betaing and to Harbin, OperationArrow, Pericardium, and MOXCRunner1 for idea bouncing and support.





	1. 1-1

In the center of the room, a little girl sleeps in a leather chair. Her shaved head leans to the right, sinking into a thick armrest already spotted with drool.

She's dreaming, or perhaps remembering, her eyelids fluttering slightly as scenes play out in her mind. With a groan, she edges away from a nightmare and pushes herself further to the right. The clink of a chain stops her, a handcuff biting into the long sweater snaking down her arms.

I glance at my client and ask, "Her?"

The man turns towards us. "Yes," he says. "You have the memories?"

"We received them direct from your friend in Boston," I confirm, and he gets out of the way. Amy and I begin to set up.

She places her suitcase next to the chair, opening it flat against the ground. One side she leaves zipped up. The other unfolds. Plastic wings shot through with wire swivel outwards to reveal drawers and cords and a single square port, lit up but empty. A screen rises and flickers on. Its readouts flatline from lack of data.

Amy starts to unbundle cables, arranging them by number and color.

I look back at the man. He's ignoring the machinery and watching Amy's hands intently.

"Is she sedated?" I ask.

"She will be soon." He snaps at a wall, "Mr. Pitter!"

"She doesn't have to be," Amy says, but a door is already opening. It admits a nurse wheeling a cart of syringes and supplies. Amy doesn't waste the opportunity. "Hold her head up."

Mr. Pitter is already behind the chair. His hands smoothly slide around her cheeks, lifting gently without covering up any of her scalp or temples.

Amy peels the backing off an electrode and affixes it to the girl's forehead. She grimaces in response to the cold of the hydrogel. Amy runs a thumb over the next patch of skin and says, "This isn't the first time you've done this to her, is it?"

"It is," the man says, and the denial sounds indistinguishable from the truth.

"What caused this rash, then?" Amy asks as she sticks another cold electrode to the girl's head. The girl's head shakes slightly, further motion arrested by Mr. Pitter's grip.

"Measurements," he says. "She's my niece, and her parents would be unhappy with me if we didn't run every possible test first."

"What tests?" I ask.

The man weaves a tale of MRIs, radioactive isotopes, and CAT scans. He pleads for sympathy. It's been difficult acquiring the right machines, running all the tests necessary to be extra sure it's safe. But think of the potential! The pliability of children's brains opens up so many avenues. It could accelerate science, education, societal growth. It might even teach us how to not just transfer memories, but copy them!

His excitement wears at the edges, a suit he's put on for this performance. I can see the girl next to him, worn down, twitchy, nodding off, and beginning to mutter to herself.

Amy attaches another electrode, and the girl opens her eyes. She looks right at me and mouths "Susan?"

I'm not sure how to respond.

Amy doesn't seem to have noticed, peeling off the backing of yet another electrode. The man is absorbed in watching her work. The nurse exists only as a prop, standing quietly behind the chair until the script tells him to move. Nobody else notices the girl's plea or her face falling as she sees me fail to respond.

The moment passes, and the girl kicks out. All her limbs jerk forward, her struggle starting and stopping at the cuffs. Mr. Pitter lets go of her and circles the chair, leaving her to desperately slide her head against the backrest. She manages to dislodge a single electrode.

"We need to sedate her," Amy says after backing up a few feet.

The nurse has already prepared the needle and pushed back one of the girl's sleeves.

Red gashes crisscross her bare wrist, the result of steel cuffs biting into skin, more appearing every time she lurches forward. Mr. Pitter ignores her movements. One hand pins down her arm while the other maneuvers the needle towards the crook of her elbow. The bevel searches for a vein between track marks and slides in. He depresses the plunger.

Mr. Pitter pulls the needle out and rolls her sleeve back down. The girl's struggles grow weaker. Her eyelids droop, and her movements lose focus.

Amy frowns as she watches the girl deflate and go limp. After a pause, she reattaches the final electrode. "What did you use and how much of it?" she asks. Mr. Pitter tells her. The response gets incorporated into her calculations, and she adjusts the settings on the machine.

Amy flips a switch, and the girl jerks suddenly, her muscles convulsing once and locking up. Her eyelids open and she stares directly forward. Her pupils dilate but don't move.

Vital signs spill out onto the screens of Amy's machine, filling them with indecipherable lines and pulses and numbers.

She unzips the other half of her suitcase to reveal rows of dense, fist-sized cubes. These single use brain jars make our work possible, a medium in which to smuggle the very stuff of thought.

She thumbs through them, examining labels, and selects one, which I walk up to and double-check. It's the correct one. She slots it into the machine and begins the transfer.

The man is outwardly calm, but his eyes betray him. They jump from the girl to the readouts to Amy to me, hyperaware of what we're doing. She's important to him. How many memories has he poured in?

"While you're here, I was hoping you could do something else for me," he says. "Is your partner going to join us? I imagine she'll want to hear this too."

"She needs to be fully focused, to monitor and adjust levels in case something goes wrong."

"Isn't it automatic at this point?"

"Most of the time. All of the time if you don't care about the recipient's sense of self. What's your proposal?"

He ignores the jab and offers me the job: a delivery to a customer we know all too well in the upper city. The package sloshes. It smells of plastic and beans. Anything could be in it—weapons, clothes, illegal body mods—but it's sealed tight, revealing nothing.

"And the payment?" I ask.

He's generous. It'll go a long way, almost a fifth of what the Teeth demand.

I accept.


	2. 1-2

The lower city is a commercial labyrinth. Its metropolitan superstructure stretches out from building to building, swallowing up dozens of floors into a series of large malls. Whole neighborhoods huddle under single roofs, subcities connected by bridges that never open into the unpredictable air.

We slip through the crowds, aiming for the troughs in the wave of commuters. We stay silent around people and dip into the gaps for brief bursts of conversation.

When we first began to work together, it was awkward and stilted. Amy hadn't known where to go or how to avoid inspections, which guards were merely corrupt and which were abusive. The lower city's polished criminality had baffled her. It had taken some time before she caught the rhythm.

Today, as the crowds thin out, Amy stays quiet, her eyes fixed on the flashy display of a nearby advertisement. 

But I'm not satisfied. The man we just met has been tumbling around in my head, that project of his touching on something I can't quite unearth. "Any idea what he's doing with the girl?" I ask.

"She's his niece," she says, clinging to that vanishing possibility as if looking away and focusing only on what she has to do could make it all okay.

"No," I say, "she's not." 

But Amy is saved from responding by a security checkpoint. The guard motions at Amy's suitcase with a metal arm. "I need to scan—"

"Mr. Spellman," I interrupt. "How's the baby?"

He gets a closer look at me and remembers. The suitcase goes unchecked, and our margins don't even take a hit. I pull Amy back into the rush of humanity.

We're an arrow cutting through the crowd, joined by interlaced fingers, weaving around clusters of people. Moving with a current is easy. It reduces navigating through the throng to a series of lane changes, and it keeps us discreet. No chance of accidentally tripping a high ranking Niner and ending up in prison for what the court will call illegal body mods or illicit memory possession.

We drift to a wall, duck behind a giant screen, and steal into a maintenance tunnel.

"That wasn't the first time she'd had memories downloaded," I say. Something obvious, just to get her talking.

"Why are we talking about this? Job's done. We deliver this package, and we never have to think about the guy again," she says.

The tunnel extends out from the tenth story and all the way to another skyscraper. Plastic slats give us a view of the outside. Cars blur by us in every direction. It feels like we're in the space between spaces, moving through a gap in the angry tangle of freeways, skyscrapers, and advertisements.

"And if she's just the first in a series?" I ask. I'm not worried about the ethics of it, but Amy is. She desperately holds onto the view that she can't change the world, just swim through it and protect those she cares about. Faced with a pattern, a further descent, something that she can cut off before it becomes even worse, she's forced to at least open her eyes.

"Neuroplasticity," she says. "He probably thinks that a kid's brain is going to be more malleable. Less information lost, fewer prior memories to muddy the waters."

I'm almost jealous of the girl. Her mind is filling up with information, other people's experiences, lifetimes' worth of knowledge. But it doesn't quite add up. "So, you drain some company exec and dump his life in a kid's head. Then what?"

"Did you see her arms?" she asks, and taps her arm with a finger. Patterned silver circuitry runs up into her sleeves, streaks of blue flashing across as she moves, and I can almost imagine her tattoos as the track marks and bruises I'd seen on the girl. "Addiction."

The tunnel ends. We enter the back room of a restaurant and weave our way between squat baroque tables, lunching executives, and dim sum carts. A waiter stops us, looking wary, likely having identified us as intruders, not customers.

I speak before he can. "I'd like to speak to the manager." 

He's confused, forced to suddenly shift social scripts. By the time he gets back, we'll be buildings away. We exit the restaurant, take two lefts, and climb up an empty set of fire stairs.

"Will it work?" I ask her.

"Depends on how many times they've done this," she says. "The mind wants a consistent narrative, not a thousand contradictions. At some point, she'll start to get them mixed up. A dozen sets of parents, friends, cities. It'll all warp together."

"How much is too much?" We make it up another flight and exit out onto a theater balcony. The lights are off.

"Five? Ten?" She shrugs.

I look out at the smudged silhouette of the grand piano on stage. "I think—" My words get caught in my throat. The conversation is about to shift, and I'm not sure why. As I push through the sudden anxiety, I feel a bit of vertigo, a bit of that paradoxical euphoria of holding a single foot out over the void and seeing if I fall. "I think she recognized me."

"Really?" Amy says, and I'm struck with the feeling that I shouldn't have shared this.

"She mouthed a name at me." The girl's recognition feels meaningful, a hint of something I shouldn't have forgotten. The void opens up, and I'm falling.  _ Susan  _ echoes in my head; my mouth stays shut. A memory swirls on the edge of awareness, and half-formed nonsense words dance across my tongue. I can't quite grasp either.

Amy's looking at me, her brow furrowed. "Oh," she says. "You probably look like someone from a memory, or from an amalgam of memory. A phantom impression made from a dozen foreign thoughts, projected onto you. Was it your name?"

"No," I say, but I almost want to say maybe.

The back of the theater opens into a hotel lobby bustling with people. We make our way past seamless walls of mirrors and low jet-black couches to the elevator that will take us to the upper city.


	3. 1-3

The elevator's buttons go all the way up the side panel, numbered creases in its transparent walls. Amy depresses one with a finger wrapped in a sleeve and slides back through the crowd  to me. We knit fingers together and wait as the elevator lurches upwards, barely balancing its thirty person load.

I can see a sliver of the bay through the glass wall of the elevator. Out on the water, barely visible against the dark sky, a rocket stands on a launch platform.

Amy pulls me a little closer and asks, "Another launch?" Some topics are innocuous enough that we talk about them even around strangers. As long as we frame everything as oblivious blathering, we can blend in with the numerous tourists and stay invisible.

"Mm. Yeah. Final test. Next one goes all the way to Mars," I say, telling her something she already knows, giving her the chance to say what she really means.

"I hear they're still looking for people," she says.

"Sounds like a nice gig," I say without feeling. "Big empty vistas. As long as you have the oxygen, you get all the space in the world." All the space. And all the loneliness. Someone pushes past me as they exit to their floor. The door closes and our reduced cast continues upwards.

"I bet they need technical people. The self reliant sort." She's learned how to follow my lead, but she's never really gotten the hang of surreptitiously bringing up topics. She errs on the side of being cryptic, comes up with euphemisms that don't quite work. 

It takes me a little work to figure out that she's talking about grinders, biohacking DIYers who tend towards the illegal side of body modding. But I know she doesn't really care about grinders in general, only one in particular. One who's already run afoul of the law.

"Your sister?" I ask. Amy's life rests on a few pillars: our relationship, her work, and Victoria. When one feels threatened, she'll pull from the other two to defend it and to make sure it can't be threatened again. She's been throwing out ideas all week, ways to keep Victoria safe in the long term, each more desperate than the last.

"She's got the skills," she says, "and so do we."

"Between the three of us, we could raise the money to send her up. After this week, of course," I say, ignoring the second part of her statement. Moving to Mars is something other people do. Victoria would love it there, adored for her skills and finally free from constraint, but I need more than the static state of a tiny village. I live through connections and thrive on controlled chaos. Unless Amy wants to choose between us, this new plan's a dud.

"Just her," she mutters, catching the implication, and lapses into silence. More people exit the elevator, freeing up enough space that it no longer feels cramped, just awkward.

Out on the launch platform in the center of the bay, lights flash and the rocket judders slightly. Steam billows out in great clouds that obscure the platform and rise up to cover the ship itself. A few seconds later, a nose cone pokes out of the top of the cloud. It accelerates until it disappears into the dense dark clouds above.

I'm reminded of what went into building that launch platform. "Had to build a lot of essentially specialized plumbing for that. When they launch a rocket like that, they pump half a million gallons of water up and under it. That's where the steam comes from. It's not a cooling system though. It's sound suppression, helps stop acoustical energy from reflecting back and damaging the ship." It's hard to stop talking. I want to go into the details of the construction, but I stop myself, feeling unaccountably strange, like two impulses are tearing at each other and I'm merely trapped in the middle.

Before I can resolve anything, Amy asks, "How do you know that?"

"I met an engineer who worked on it," I half-lie. In an attempt to leave the topic, I point at an abnormally dark section of skyscraper and ask a question I know the the answer to. "Are those bars inside those windows?"

A man standing beside us breaks into our conversation and answers. "It's Brockton Jail. Not a holiday spot." He wears a suit, and I spot a hint of scarring through his thinning hair. It matches the implants that mid-level Niners are required to have.

"Oh," I say and fall silent, acting properly cowed.

Amy stares out at the jail. Her sister is somewhere in there, her augs unmaintained, waiting for a sham trial. Once she loses, she'll be moved out of the city, sold by a bankrupt government to Civic Securities Group. Afterwards, escape will become much more difficult.

In the upper city, the CSG is known as the Grays. Their prisons are small, holding pens for orange jumpsuits that occasionally dress people. Everything else about them is monochrome, gray, and alien, from guard dress codes to ethical views.

They campaign against the death penalty, but leaked documents record thousands of brain jars purchased by them from BS Corp. The dominant theory is that they download prisoners into them, destroying their brains in the process. That once someone is in their care, they forfeit everything to become just another bit of data looping over and over in the Grays' archives. 

The official narrative in the lower city is quite different. They claim they're merely a model corporate prison with an impossibly low recidivism rate. Their media department is active online and stays in regular contact with the fractured world of modern journalism, pushing their image of a near-perfect prison system that keeps society running smoothly. Disappearing prisoners are never mentioned.

Ten floors from our destination, the last straggler exits the elevator and we're left alone.

"Two more jobs of this caliber, and we'll be set," I say. Victoria's breakout is going to drain our savings, but those will recover with time. If we fail, Amy may not.

"I—" she begins. "Well, I'm sorry to pester, but—"

"You're worried we won't make it in time," I say. "She was looking okay just yesterday. No infections around her incisions. No fever or signs of rejection."

"One of your…?"

"Yep. He brought her some immunosuppressants too." My hold on my contacts in the jail itself is limited, only enough to get us a little information. Our sneaking skills are insufficient to get in from below. We're betting on a talented team of skyscraper spelunkers rappelling down, breaking through the windows and bars, and pulling Victoria out.

The elevator stops. This is the highest it'll go, fifteen stories below the the very top. The remainder of the skyscraper has been swallowed into the upper city and condemned by the lower. We exit into dingy, poorly-lit halls, and trace a path to a staircase half-heartedly blocked off with caution tape.

The following floors are progressively dirtier and less finished. Wallpaper cedes to paint cedes to wooden beams hung with lopsided, chewed-up drywall. The people who live in this liminal area are nomads, never squatting so long that they have to deal with theft from above or police raids from below, but mostly these halls are empty, a DMZ of sorts.

As we ascend, we begin to see traces of life again. A woman leans against a wall, holding a cigarette in an articulated chrome hand with digits so large they span her entire face. A trio of children play cards in a trashed suite. A man with more tattoos than bare skin hangs a moving poster on a wall. "Big Wins! All Tender Accepted!" spills onto it in excited show lights, followed by directions to a casino four rooftops away.

Chatter drifts down from above, and the walls finish their transformation into sheet metal and reused plastic. The air grows bitter, almost metallic. The only light comes from flickering advertisements that hang from the makeshift structures around us, polished temptations in a city built of other men's trash.

We weave our way through narrow alleys, by piles of scraps, over sleeping homeless, and to the edge of the building. This side of the building has no walls, only support columns. A lattice of welded rebar spans the gap to the next skyscraper. Someone's laundry hangs down over the bridge from the floor above and sways slightly in the breeze.

This is the upper city: slums, criminals, and experimental technology, draped over civilization like a dirty plastic sheet. It's unmapped and twisted, a haphazard collection of shoddy constructions splashing out over Brockton's rooftops. If I hadn't had a lifetime or two to learn its ins and outs, it would have been impossible to navigate. I pull Amy onwards.


End file.
